Editorial Note: Spoilers ahead for the movie “Saturday Night.”
In “Saturday Night,” the SNL’s now-famous studio 8H stage is still under construct in the waning minutes before the show’s first live-from-New-York broadcast. Production designer Leo Yoshimura has being laying bricks for the stage by himself for the last few hours with stagehands refusing to chip in. But as the clock winds down and momentum shifts in favor of the novice cast, writers and creators of “NBC’s Saturday Night” (as the show was originally titled) actually succeeding, stagehands jump in to finish the work all together. Footage of the effort is montaged with clips of everyone else pulling the show together just before air, providing the only semi-saccharine and symbolic moment of the movie. Director Jason Reitman is not-so-subtly telling the viewer that “Saturday Night Live” is only the comedy institution that it is today because the entire SNL team pieced together that first show, quite literally, brick-by-brick.
In the hour or so before that moment, “Saturday Night” pays homage to the people on that team in an exciting and frankly, unexpected way. That is to say, the movie doesn’t shy away from the fact that a disproportionate amount of people who built SNL were Jews.
“Saturday Night,” which premiered in select theaters just ahead of the 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” and will be widely released on Oct. 11, 2024, follows fledgling SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) between 10 p.m. ET and 11:30 p.m. ET on Oct. 11, 1975. To put it mildly, it’ll be a miracle if everyone can pull their shit together. The dress rehearsal is over three hours long and a mess, John Belushi (Matt Wood) hasn’t signed his contract yet, the set isn’t built, the censor has copious amounts of rewrites and NBC Executive David Tebet (Willem DeFoe) is ready to call the whole thing off and air a rerun of “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”
It’s the kind of movie that, per the actual history of the events it’s dramatizing, could easily have an unacknowledged but core Jewishness to it. Before the SNL creator was Lorne Michaels, he was Lorne Lipowitz, the son of Canadian Jewish furrier Abraham Lipowitz. He grew up in the Toronto Jewish community, becoming a bar mitzvah in 1957 at Beth Sholom Synagogue. Out of the 12 people on the writing staff of the first season of SNL, at least 6 are Jews. Aside from Michaels, this includes the daughter of Canadian Jewish comedian Frank Shuster and Michael’s first wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), Marilyn Suzanne Miller, Anne Beatts (Leander Suleiman), future Senator of Minnesota Al Franken (Taylor Gray) and Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener). And two of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players, Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairne), were Jews as well.
But instead, “Saturday Night” writers Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, both Jews themselves, explicitly nod to the Jewish sensibility of “Saturday Night Live.” Early on in the movie, Lorne, NBC executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) are pulled away from rehearsals to greet NBC affiliates in an executive suite. Chase performs stand-up for the crowded room of men, many of whom are from middle America. He sets up a joke about the diversity of New York City and then says something to the effect of, “If you want to meet Black people, go to Harlem. And if you want to meet Jews, go to our writers’ room.”
Later, in the aforementioned very Jewish writers room, cast members and writers are prepping for the show. “You’re everyone’s favorite, Gilda,” Newman says, sheepishly. “Oh, I’m just a bagel looking for lox,” Radner replies. Jewish food gets another mention when, in a moment when Lorne Michaels feels ready to call it quits, he walks to a bar near 30 Rock and sees a Borscht Belt-esque comedian badly performing good jokes. He strikes up a conversation with a guy meticulously making notes in a binder filled with over 1,100 punchlines. It turns out to be the man who wrote the jokes, aka Alan Zweibel. Michaels hires Zweibel on the spot, but not before the Borscht Belt comedian tries to protest, saying that Zweibel is just some guy who slices pastrami at a deli in Queens.
Kenan and Reitman also heavily emphasize just how nebbische and geeky a lot of the Jewish men at SNL were. Lorne Michaels is perpetually followed around by his cousin and assistant Neil Levy (Andrew Barth Feldman), who at one point accidentally becomes so high he locks himself in an office. Al Franken and his writing partner Tom Davis seemingly wander the halls of the eighth floor, trying out new sketch ideas. At one point, wearing goggles and white hazmat suits and looking pretty geeky, Franken and Davis spray Michaels with fake blood — testing it out for the now-famous Julia Child sketch. Musician Paul Shaffer (Paul Rust), who would later play “abba” in the impromptu seder which took place at SNL in 1976, hunches over his piano and at one point, extremely meekishly tells announcer Don Pardo (Brian Welch) how to pronounce Dan Aykroyd’s (Dylan O’Brien) name. And Jewish comedians Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) and Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) wait around, doing bits or, in Kaufman’s case, getting lost, to see if their acts will make the final show.
The problems caused by the extremely evangelical NBC censor Joan Carbunkle (Catherine Curtin), too, pose the network as a force of Christian hegemonic mainstream American values in direct opposition with the subversive counter-culture voice “Saturday Night Live” was trying to be. An off-hand comment by executive Dave Tebet, telling Chevy Chase that as a charming “gentile” he has a future in show business has the same effect. Through both of these moments, the audience sees SNL as all the more Jewy and just generally non-WASPy.
In a moment close to the end of the film, Lorne Michaels and Rosie Shuster find themselves in a 30 Rock elevator, headed back upstairs to see if the show will actually happen or not. Throughout the film, Michaels has been trying to figure out if Shuster would use the name “Rosie Shuster” or “Rosie Michaels” as her credit. In the elevator, they finally talk about the issue once and for all. They decide that Shuster will be credited with her maiden name and Michaels confesses that he didn’t want her to feel like it would hurt his feelings to not use his name. As the doors open, Shuster walks out and basically says, “It’s not even your name, Lipowitz.” Emphasizing “Lipowitz,” the gibe becomes a good-natured jab in the chest.
The conceit of the movie is that we all know what happens in the end. “NBC’s Saturday Night” goes to air and eventually becomes the premiere comedy institution of “Saturday Night Live.” For the characters, of course, that ending feels like a far-off fantasy. But even as they wrestle with what their counter-culture show is and can be, what’s never unclear is who they are. “Saturday Night” the television show was built by Lorne Lipowitz and so many other Jews. In “Saturday Night” the film, Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan never let the viewer forget it.
